Andy Burnham says the government is promoting a false view of happiness. Photograph: Rex Features

Andy Burnham, the shadow health secretary, says the government's goal of measuring happiness is in danger of promoting "middle-class" materialistic aspirations and ignoring the urgent need to help people cope with life's peaks and troughs.

In a world where communities are fragmented, the economy is flat-lining and people are living longer, but often in isolation, Burnham says that encouraging "resilience" should be the ultimate objective for the government.

Last year David Cameron announced that a "happiness agenda" would see ministers using a number of methods to measure how happy Britain is, including a survey of 200,000 people. The results will allow each local authority to compare and contrast the happiness of their residents, and Cameron wants government policy to react to the results.

But Burnham believes that by promoting happiness as a goal – all too often defined by wealth and possessions – the prime minister and his Liberal Democrat deputy, Nick Clegg, are setting people up for a fall.

The former Labour leadership candidate, who will make a major speech this week explaining how the NHS can promote better mental health, told the Observer that the "modern condition" of fragmented families and communities, together with job instability, means that the priority should be to provide support. The health service was designed to deal mainly with physical frailties, but should do more to help protect people from the stresses of modern living.

"Cameron and Clegg have done this whole thing about happiness, and I am not against the principle, but I think that is the wrong word. There is a slight danger that it sets people up: 'You have got to be happy. If you are not happy, you are failing'," he said. "So talking about mental health in terms of happiness has become the modern way of talking about mental health: 'Mental health is happiness'. And I don't think it is. It is slightly in danger of being a middle-class construct there, builds a bit of materialism into it. I think what we are talking about is resilience. Are you coping? Are you getting by? That is the bottom line."

The World Health Organisation predicts that by 2030 more people will be affected by depression than any other health problem. Yet most developing countries are spending less than 2% of their national budgets on mental healthcare, and Britain spends about 1.7%.

Burnham said the NHS needed to "wake up" to the challenge in an age where people did not always have the support networks that previous generations enjoyed. "Some people aren't able to call on that sort of emotional strength from other places and don't cope. It is the modern condition."

It is not an argument that completely convinces Lord Layard, the economist, who has set up the Action for Happiness movement to promote wellbeing. While agreeing with Burnham that resilience is an important part of the answer to society's ills, he counters that even in difficult economic times it is only a means to an end and that part of the battle is to redefine happiness so people do not associate it with material success.

"I think resilience is very, very important and I am promoting a programme in schools to build resilience among children," he said. "The problem with the word 'resilience' is it has a slightly dour sense to it and comes from handling adversity and there is something more positive to say.

"It is all too easy to get distorted priorities, because some things are very salient, like money, promotion or success, and we are always likely to go to the straightforward goals at the expense of human relationships. But happiness measurements have been done for 50 years in the UK and the US and they are no higher than when they started, which is a serious indictment of the priorities we have allowed ourselves to acquire. But if we can get the right priorities of the feeling of happiness, then we can move to a higher plateau."

A similar argument is proposed by author Tal Ben-Shahar, whose book, Happier, is given away in today's Observer. He believes there are clear ways to be happy and that happiness can be encouraged and nurtured. "If we defined happiness as the experience of pleasure, then I think [Burnham] is right, it isn't worth prioritising as an individual goal, let alone as a national policy. But if it has a deeper meaning, more like resilience, then it is worth striving for."

Sign up for the Guardian Today

Our editors' picks for the day's top news and commentary delivered to your inbox each morning.